On Sat, 15 Nov 2003, bulia byak wrote:
Have anyone tested the unsinkable dialogs? Any comments? Just to remind you, the two dialogs I've been working on - toolbox and fill/stroke - are now not only transient but unsinkable (stay on top of the topmost document window when there are many). Also they remember shape and position within session so you can turn them off and then on again without losing your layout. (What remains to be done is an all-dialogs-toggle; I will do this shortly.) Inserting the same into all other dialogs is a boring work, and I want to be sure that these new features work perfectly with these two dialogs before I spread them everywhere. So please test heavily and report any problems or concerns.
Sorry I haven't gotten to this sooner; last weekend was very busy with other Inkscape stuff, and this last week has been very busy for me at work, and yesterday I spent the whole day working on arrowheads. :-)
I tested lightly and I think I understand where you're going with it and like it. I'm concerned we may get feedback only after making a release... I wonder if we should do a pre-release to encourage people to try things out and provide feedback? Or I can go bug some of the other developers into testing it out, if you'd like. In any case, if you need to, make a decision based on how you feel it should be and go forward, and I'll support that.
By the way, be prepared for a possible flame from Gnome developers. Here's what Havoc Pennington writes in his book:
" A transient dialog is one that appears and is dismissed relatively quickly. (GnomeDialog is really meant for transient dialogs.) Some "dialogs" are just small windows, such as the tool palette in the Gimp. These persistent ("floating") dialogs should be minimizable without minimizing the parent, and they should not be forced to stay above the parent window."
Which IMHO is very wrong: it does not matter how long a dialog stays open, it only matters what you do with it. A tool palette makes no sense without a document to apply these tools to, and therefore must be "transient" to stay on top. Unfortunately someone chose this wrong term ("transient" meaning "temporary") and this seems to affect many programmers who underutilize transient windows making their interfaces almost unusable (GIMP is not the only example).
It sounds like this would make a good Wiki topic.
Also checked in today:
- space switches to selector temporarily; another space switches
back. This required writing a new set of functions to switch tools (tools-switch.c) but now it's much easier to do
Interesting; switching between selector and back is a common activity for me, this could be useful. I'll have to remember to try it out. :-)
- ctrl-` and ctrl-shift-` opens the toolbox
If only one instance of the toolbox is allowed, and will always be on top, then might it worth having ctrl-` work as an on/off toggle?
I may be absent for some days - need to reboot to windows to do a project in Xara/Illustrator :) Feel free to leave comments on wiki.
Hope the project goes well; sounds like many of us have gotten temporarily pulled away by school, work, and such.
By the way, I highly suggest when adding items to the roadmap, space them out through the milestones to give yourself some breathing room; if you assign yourself only a few items for a given milestone it always feels much more within reach and gives some buffer against Real Life intrusions. Also there's no rule you can't have things marked done for some future milestone, if you get ambitious! :-)
I mention this mainly because my experience with other projects is that December can be kind of a hit-or-miss month for open source developers due to holidays, finals, and other end-of-year activities. Some developers will have some time during their vacations to put in, whereas others will be focusing on other priorities, and that's cool. I'd like to get 0.36 released and out of the way before we get too far into December for this reason; after that we can enjoy the holidays and play things by ear, and pick up again some time in January. :-)
Bryce